An Atlas of Extinct Countries

by Gideon Defoe

Languages: Russian, Ukrainian, Crimean Tartar

  Currency: Russian ruble, Ukrainian hryvnia

  Cause of death: the comparatively nice weather

  Today: a (disputed) part of Russia

  ///mere.crab.juggled

  The problem with being a Bold Man of Action like Vladimir Putin is that there are only so many creatures you can wrestle with your shirt off/migrating geese you can lead back home in your micro-glider/ancient urns you can find on your impromptu and very legitimate underwater archaeological dives. When the photo ops run dry you’ve got one option left, the predictable choice of all good despots: take over Crimea.

  For hundreds of years, Crimea has found itself in a constant state of getting conquered and re-conquered. Surrounded by a sea that can burst into flames during a thunderstorm – dead vegetation from the last ice age has created a barren zone 90 metres down from which noxious flammable gas occasionally bubbles up – the Crimean peninsula also lies on one of those geopolitical fault lines that means it’s doomed to have an exhausting time of it.

  According to Herodotus, the first settlers were the Cimmerians, who were such an incredibly proud people they opted for mass suicide when invaded by the Scythians.* After the Scythians came the Greeks, then the Taurians, the Goths, the Kipchaks, the Alans,† the Rus’, the Khazars, the Armenians, the Mongols and the Genoese. For the Russian tsars, Crimea had represented a relaxing holiday home, a rare piece of the empire where your face wouldn’t freeze off if you tried to go for a swim.

  Years later, the distant twisted memory of one of those early eras – the Ostrogothic Kingdom – would be the basis for a new Gothia; a brief, evil regime set up by the Nazis during World War II that led to the deaths of thousands. That was followed by Stalin, who set about deporting the mainly Tartar population to gulags.‡ The whole place was then gifted to Ukraine by the Soviets as a showy anniversary present – Nikita Khrushchev mistakenly believing it went paper, cotton, Crimea. This didn’t mean all that much though, seeing as Ukraine was firmly part of the USSR – a situation nobody saw changing anytime soon.

  But that empire crumbled too, like they do.§ When Ukraine started its political drift towards the West, taking Crimea with it, the peninsula’s fate became semi-inevitable. The big problem for Putin was that Sevastopol is one of the only warm water ports Russia had access to, and there was no way a Bold Man of Action was going to see that slip away under his watch.

  On 16 March 2014, Crimea held a referendum to proclaim independence from Ukraine, albeit a brief and very unconvincing independence of one single day prior to falling into Russia’s arms. And while that referendum was certainly a bit suspect, the situation is (slightly) more complicated than a rapacious Putin flat-out stealing some territory: after Stalin’s decimation of the Tartars, much of the now largely Russian population on the peninsula were simply more sympathetic to throwing their lot in with the motherland. The West made a lot of unhappy noises on behalf of Ukraine, and were ultimately pretty happy not to be forced to intervene. Russia has the pipelines and a lot of Europe quite likes being able to heat their homes in winter. But it would be a bad bet to assume that this is the last time Crimea finds itself under new ownership.

  * As ever, even though the peninsula is one of the places Herodotus visited rather than just imagined from the comfort of his couch, he is not a totally reliable source.

  † The Alans weren’t some men all called Alan; they were Iranian nomads.

  ‡ The Putin-baiting, Ukrainian winner of the 2016 Eurovision Song Contest was about Stalin’s deportation of the Tartars from Crimea.

  § Crimea also had a flirtation with independence in 1992, when in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse it separated from Ukraine for just over an entire week.

  Yugoslavia

  1918–41, 1945–92

  Population: 23 million (by 1991)

  Capital: Belgrade

  Languages: Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian, Slovene

  Currency: dinar

  Cause of death: nobody thought they were from Yugoslavia

  Today: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia

  ///koala.plotting.dramatic

  In 1989, a band called Riva won the Eurovision Song Contest with the numbingly dull ‘Rock Me’. This meant Yugoslavia got to be hosts the following year. By the time 1990 rolled around, things were looking shaky. The Croatians were unimpressed by the Serbian singer chosen to represent them. The Serbs rolled their eyes at what they regarded as inept Croatian staging. The song came seventh.

  The year after that, the Yugoslav entry came second to last. The year after that the country didn’t exist, at least not in the same form that had so improbably been turning up for the previous three decades. The question was how it had ever managed to last that long.

  The answer can be summed up as: Tito. The new Kingdom of Yugoslavia,* barely out of its bubble wrap, first fell apart in World War II. Croatia enthusiastically hooked up with the Axis powers. So enthusiastically in fact, that the Nazis found the Croat massacres of the Serbs a bit hard to stomach (compared to their own, much neater genocides). The Serbian nationalist Chetniks, with their skull-and-crossbones flag, matched their neighbour’s violent zeal, atrocity for atrocity. Tito’s Communist partisans were the third strand of a messy conflict, and the ones who came out on top. Mutual war crimes aren’t the most solid basis for a nation, but over the next 30 years Tito managed to wodge everything back together, partly through sheer force of personality.

  He was the Communist who liked to eat off solid gold plates. The seventh of fifteen children, his real genius was being able to adjust. He juggled and re-juggled the conflicting interests of the populace. Most significantly, he dared to disagree with Stalin. Stalin took being disagreed with in the exact way you would imagine: not well. After Yugoslavia went off on its own non-Soviet, non-capitalist ‘third way’, Tito had to send a letter to the Russian leader politely requesting that he stop trying to have him assassinated.†‡

  The economy grew, literacy rates soared, Yugoslavia seemed to prosper under Tito. Especially Tito himself, who had 32 official residences, a fancy yacht and his own private zoo. But, under the surface, the country was racking up crippling deficits. Everyone suspected things would go south again without the unifying figure of the man in charge. The hope was that he would somehow live forever.

  He died on 4 May 1980 at 3.05 p.m. The meaningless and slightly desperate catchphrase adopted by the Communists in the aftermath of his death – ‘After Tito – Tito!’ – suggests they knew the problem they were facing. The country limped on but the centrifugal forces of nationalism spun faster. When the rebranded Communists’ unintentionally funny new slogan – ‘This time we mean it!’ – failed to impress, nationalists swept to power in Croatia. Meanwhile Serbia, seeing itself as the dutiful grown-up holding the federation together, was now under the sway of the murderous Slobodan Milošević. When multi-ethnic Bosnia declared independence in 1992, the whole place blew up into a predictably horrific war.

  It’s common to say that Yugoslavia never made sense as a country,§ which is true, but it’s also true that the forces that ripped it apart never made much sense either. Religious differences pretended to be national ones. The Croats thought the Serbs made their coffee wrong; the Serbs thought the Croats were too flashy by half. Both thought the Slovenes were only interested in money. The history of ‘ethnic origins’ in Europe is an impossibly complicated subject full of holes and conjecture; archaeologists and historians are left scratching their heads. The Yugoslav population, like most populations, based their identity and mutual mistrust on … nothing very much. But ludicrous little details can be enough to bring a nation down; it doesn’t always have to be Napoleon.

  * Yugoslavia emerged as more than just a concept in 1918, though at first it was called ‘the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes’. This catchy name gives a clue as to t
he fact this wasn’t a country entirely dreamed up by the locals, but by Woodrow Wilson’s hopeful new League of Nations as an attempt to make some sense of the existing Balkan states, at that point regarded as an international headache.

  † Tito survived the assassination attempts because Russian – ‘We’re just here to visit your beautiful cathedral!’ – Intelligence wasn’t any more competent then than it is now (allegedly, one plan drawn up involved delivering ‘a box of poison gas’).

  ‡ Tito’s letter, supposedly found among Stalin’s papers after his death, said: ‘Stop sending people to kill me. If you don’t stop I’ll send one to Moscow, and I won’t have to send a second.’

  § In 1991, only 6 per cent of the population identified as ‘Yugoslavian’.

  Flags

  ‘Flags aren’t important, you can’t eat a flag’

  So said the chief minister of the KwaZulu Bantustan, explaining why his fake country didn’t have one.* He was wrong. If Monsieur Mangetout could eat an entire aeroplane, then you could certainly eat a flag so long as you put your mind to it. But also: obviously flags are important; people take almost nothing else as seriously as they take flags, even the ones from extinct countries. The Confederate States of America hasn’t been a thing for a century and a half, but that doesn’t stop cowardly Nazis (in those parts of Europe where the swastika is banned) from using the Confederate flag as a coded bumper sticker. The Taiwanese flag emoji noticeably fails to appear on Chinese iPhones. If you fly the flag of Wales at the Eurovision Song Contest, they’ll kick you out.

  Another reason that flags are important: there is a strong argument to be made that 90 per cent of the reason people start countries in the first place is because they want an excuse to get into flag design. How else to explain the number of supposedly busy leaders who found the time to personally sit down and sketch something out themselves? Or the fact that several nations got around to the flag stuff even before they sorted out more pressing matters, like a government? But not all flags are created equal, so here are the Top Five Deceased National Flags.

  The Principality of Elba: Designed by Napoleon himself en route to his exile, he took the old flag and added some bees, correctly following the twin principles that 1) any creature on a flag automatically improves it and 2) everyone likes bees. If he hadn’t already had his conquering-the-world hobby, Napoleon would have made an excellent full-time flag designer. Supposedly the bees represented ‘power and immortality’. Bees are not immortal – they live for about 120 days and die if they have sex – so it’s safe to say Napoleon wasn’t a bee expert.

  The Kingdom of Corsica: A legitimately clever bit of rejigging by the Corsican rebels. Like Napoleon, they tweaked the old emblem – in their case it showed a blindfolded slave – which they redrew with the blindfold now worn as a bandana to demonstrate their liberation from the Genoese.

  The People’s Republic of Tannu Tuva: A good colour scheme, a map of the country, plus a man with a lance on a flying horse. Whereas the Kingdom of Sikkim simplified its flag because it was felt the old version was too hard to draw, Tuva fully committed to being Overly Busy, which is a relief in a world of quite boring flags that could do with more going on.

  The Free State of Fiume: Like his hero Napoleon, D’Annunzio took a hands-on approach and designed his own flag. A snake eating its own tail! The constellation of Orion (possibly a homage to his friends in the IRA)! An unusual vertical design to make it extra-fascist! The up-in-your-face ‘Who is against us?’ motto! D’Annunzio can’t be accused of holding back, at any rate.

  The Republic of Formosa: The happiest face on any flag. They should commission a Netflix series about the Formosa tiger having adventures. Along with his pals the Dahomey crown-wearing elephant and the Perloja religious bison.

  * Two days after saying that flags weren’t important and that it wouldn’t have a flag, KwaZulu had a flag.

  Anthems

  We Stand Firm Like the Big Cliffs

  You’ve got a lot of choices to make when trying to settle on your country’s anthem. ‘Indistinguishable pompous dirge’ is the most popular option. ‘Upbeat to the point of insanity’ is a close second. For hardcore masochists, the Greek anthem goes on for 158 verses. Japan gets it done in four lines. A handful of places wisely settle for instrumentals, to save on awkward Olympic podium miming issues.

  Approaches taken by deceased nations:

  Emo

  The Kingdom of Corsica hid behind a fringe and stomped up the stairs to its room and wanted you to know that it was very dark and serious and didn’t listen to that pop fluff other countries were into:

  Towards you sighs and moans

  Our distressed heart

  In a sea of pain

  And bitterness.

  In a sea of pain

  And bitterness.

  It goes on repeating that last part, in case you’ve not yet got a handle on how miserable they were.

  Boastful

  The semi-comical anthem written for Orélie-Antoine de Tounen’s Araucanía took a Trumpian approach to self-deprecating understatement:

  Oh great Orélie, Lord of the Mapuches.

  You are famous without equal

  Orélie, to your honour fifty pretty girls will dance the Malumbo.

  FIFTY.

  Boastful yet also underwhelming

  Tuva’s anthem (taken from an old folk song) made a big deal of having ‘nine different animals’, which is not that many animals. In a touching ‘this time next year Rodney, we’ll be millionaires’ coda, it also talks about how if they feed the nine different animals, they’ll get rich.

  Lazy

  When the Soviet Union died, Russia kept the tune and simply changed the lyrics to something a bit less Soviet. Meanwhile, Neutral Moresnet just swapped out the words to ‘Little Christmas Tree’ (and did it in Esperanto, of course).

  Tardy

  Yugoslavia didn’t get around to adopting an anthem for ages, so the popular song ‘Hey, Slavs’ became the unofficial one. In 1988, after 40 years, they finally decided to formally make ‘Hey, Slavs’ their anthem, moments before the country collapsed. The lesson from this is: nail down your anthem early.

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